1. What organization that was part of the Civil Rights Movement did you
join?

Friends of SNCC. SNCC was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
one of the two main organizations, the other being
SCLC — Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
"Friends of SNCC" was the Northern affiliate of SNCC, which was based in
the South. There was a small chapter at Columbia
University — maybe a dozen of us.

2. Why did you join the Civil Rights Movement?

In high school I was following the civil rights movement through
newspapers and magazines. I was increasingly outraged at segregation and
the horrible conditions suffered by African Americans. As the attacks of
the Ku Klux Klan and the Southern states grew, I became convinced that
militant action was needed to end segregation. When I came to Columbia
as a freshman in 1964, I rapidly found the Friends of SNCC chapter and
joined it.

3. What did you do in the Civil Rights Movement?

I was not active in the moment for that long — basically
only my first year at Columbia. At Columbia, I helped to organize some
demonstrations near the University in Harlem. Things began to heat up in
the late winter, as the battle for voting rights in Selma grew. This
was also during the time that Johnson was escalating the war in Vietnam.
We combined both protests in one demonstration, chanting "out of Saigon,
into Selma" meaning that the government send troops to Selma to protect
the marchers against the state troopers and the Klan.

After the first march in Selma had been beaten back, there was a call
for a much large march with support nationally. Bill Strickland, an
African-American who led our SNCC chapter, decided that we should go
down. Like many in SNCC, he was suspicious of Dr. King and felt that he
was too willing to compromise and too dependent on the US government.
But Strickland felt that the march from Selma would be an opportunity to
organize in Alabama and build the fight for voting rights.

We were to go down shortly in advance of the second march and stop in
Atlanta to raise money and food for the march from among the
middle-class African-American community there. Since I was only 17 at
the time, Strick, as we called him, insisted that I get my parents
permission to go. (A few years later, in the midst of the anti-war
protests, such concern for legal niceties would have seemed quaint.) My
parents gave permission. I did not think much of it at the time, but
looking back, now a parent myself, they were brave to do so. One of the
marchers, a white minister, had already been killed in Selma as had the
civil rights workers Cheney, Goodman and Schwerner the previous year. So
there was a danger, but they thought it was a battle worth fighting.

As to myself, I was not in the least worried. Like most 17-years-olds
who have not been in a war, I did not have any sense of my own
mortality. I was secretly excited by the prospect of facing down the
Klan.

Five of us, all white students, drove down to Atlanta. Strick took the
bus down separately, as he thought it would be really asking for trouble
to drive though the South with a black man and a white woman in the car.
(It was just that situation which led to the murder of Viola Liuzzo, a
marcher, shortly after the end of the Selma march.) The woman's name was
Jean Murphy, a graduate student at Columbia and I forget the names of
the other guys.

We stopped in Atlanta, where an African-American family put us
up — and fed us a terrific
breakfast — we did our fund-raising going door to door
in a suburb. Then we headed for Selma.

When we arrived, the night before the second march, things were up in
the air. Five days earlier, right before we left for the South, Johnson
on March 15th had introduced the Voting Rights Act and echoed the
movement's slogan "we shall overcome". I, and many historians who have
since written about it, feel that he did that in direct response to the
growing demonstrations in Selma and especially the threat that marchers
from all over the country, including both black and white, were already
descending on Selma. He wanted to avoid another confrontation like that
of the first march.

But we had come anyway, not trusting to Johnson to get the bill passed,
and by the night before the march, we knew that there would be no state
troopers to bar the march. But Governor Wallace said he could not and
would not protect the marchers either from the Klan, who were
threatening to attack the marchers. While we were waiting to get housing
assignments for the night, we heard rumors that the Klan would indeed
attack us, perhaps that night. I did not give these rumors much
credence, since by then it seemed very likely that Johnson would not
allow a second attack, one that would show that he did not have any
control in the South.

In fact, when we woke up the next morning, our safety was quite well
assured. Johnson had federalized the Alabama National Guard, putting
them under the direct command of regular US army officers and had sent
US army military police to take control of Selma. The Alabama National
Guard was to protect the march, a situation we all found ironic, since
they were the same crackers that, under Wallace orders, would have been
happy to attack us themselves. But this was 1965, not 1861, and the
Federal orders would be obeyed.

Downtown Selma was in fact swarming with hundreds of MPs tooling around
in their Jeeps, directing traffic. They in turn were heavily outnumbered
by the three or four thousand of us who were now converging on to a
square to listen to the rally and await the beginning of the march. We
heard Dr. King and other speakers, although, to be frank, I did not pay
much attention to what they said. Then we got under way. It was quite an
inspiring sight to see the thousands of us pouring across the Pettus
bridge where, a few weeks before, the smaller first march had been
thrown back by tear gas, dogs and beatings.

We then marched on toward Montgomery. Along the ridge bordering the
highway we saw every hundred yards or so the Guardsmen with their rifles
and fixed bayonets. There would be no attack on the march.

It was a very festive atmosphere. But we could not march the whole four
days. We had come down early for the fund rising and had to get back to
school. So late in the afternoon, well sunburned, we climbed into an
open truck and took a rather wild ride back to Selma. This time five of
us, including Strick, took the bus back to NY as the car was needed in
Selma for ferrying marchers.

That was pretty much it. Soon after we returned home, we learned of the
shooting of Ms. Liuzzo.

4. What were the effects of what you and other people did during the
movement?

The Selma march was a key turning point in the civil rights Movement.
While it was small by today's standards of marches of hundreds of
thousands, or of the Vietnam era of only a few years later, when there
were marches of up to half a million, it made a big difference. It
proved that significant number of people from the North, from all across
the country, would go into the south en masse to fight for the rights of
African-Americans and to end segregation.

Its impact was magnified by the political situation of the time. Johnson
was intent on sending troops to Vietnam. He wanted to end the strife of
the civil rights era, the strife that the Selma conflict had brought
into every living room. He wanted no domestic opposition when he was
gearing up for war. Congress too wanted to try to end the upheavals by
passing the Voting Rights bill. This is how social change often
happens — the powers that be give concessions in the
hope that a mass movement will be satisfied and die out.

The Voting Right law, passed in August, 1965 was the most decisive piece
of legislation of that era, By given African-Americans the right to vote
throughout the South and setting up Federal enforcement mechanisms to
prevent their being cheated, the Act decisively ended segregation. When
Sheriffs and mayors had to answer to a mainly African-American
electorate or one in which the African-American vote was a large
minority, segregationists and open racists could not survive in power.

Overall, the Civil Rights Movement greatly improved the lives of
African-Americans who lived in the South, the majority of all
African-Americans. Unfortunately, it did not succeed in ending economic
discrimination against them, which was strong in the North as well. Some
of its achievements were rolled back starting with the Reagan years.
Today, African-Americans still have not achieved equality. But the
horrors of segregation are gone — the humiliations, the
lynchings, the beatings. And that is a real victory that only came about
because of the actions of those who joined the movement.

Today, I and many others are working in a new civil rights movement to
gain equal rights for all immigrants. There too, I think we will win.